December 3, 2001, Midlothian, Virginia. A new tool to make an index for a web site was announced by Virginia Systems today. Sonar Bookends Professional, for Macintosh and Windows, can now scan through web site html files and build an html-based index. Once the index has been put on the web site, any user with a browser can then view all html pages on the web site that contain a particular term or concept. The product is not a search engine, but actually generates a static web page with hypertext links.

The index can consist of subjects of sentences, proper nouns, words filtered by frequency, a user-supplied list of items or any combination of these things. Sonar Bookends Professional can detect the subjects, proper nouns, and words automatically.

Besides the new web-site index feature, Sonar Bookends Professional can also make a conventional index and table of contents for QuarkXPress, PageMaker, FrameMaker, PDF, Word, and other file formats without having to do time-consuming marking.

Sonar Bookends Professional 2002 is $395 without web-site indexing. Web-site indexing is an additional $400. Customers who bought Sonar Bookends Professional before December 3, 2001 can update to the new version without web-site indexing for free and can get the web-site indexing feature for $300 until February 24, 2002. After that date the cost to add web-site indexing will be $400.

A free demonstration copy of Sonar Bookends Professional can be downloaded from Virginia Systems web site at: http://www.virginiasystems.com

Virginia Systems was founded in 1984 and specializes in document imaging, text retrieval, automatic index-generation, cross-referencing, and footnote software.